What do you think a shader is? Shaders are executed on the hardware friend.
So by that definition a c++ program is not software because it's executed on the hardware?
And again, you are wrong about performing PCF manually in the shader not being slower. See chapter 6.2 in this official NVIDIA document:
“Hardware shadow mapping”
means that we have dedicated special transistors specifically for performing the shadow map depth comparison and percentage-closer filtering operations. We recommend that you take advantage of this feature, as it produces higher quality filtered shadow map edges very efficiently. Because dedicated transistors exist for hardware shadow mapping, you will lose performance and quality if you try to emulate our shadow mapping algorithm with ps_2_0 of higher.
I never said it was faster. Please read what others write. And I thought it would be implied that when I say "executed on the hardware", I was referring to the GPU which is exactly where tex2DProj is executed. If NVIDIA has made a specific dedicated service for this in their hardware, great, but again it isn't free, which was my original point. Shaders are not considered software in terms of where the program executes on the computer. Shaders execute on the GPU.
You yourself used a hardware/software reference, exactly like I did(implying gpu/cpu).
"It does work like that (it's a D3D9 extension that every card supports nowadays), and the term is correct as the filtering is performed by the hardware and not by calculations in the shader (software)." Software runs on hardware doesn't it?
So I am not quite sure where you get off trying to call me out.